NIA grills workers of firm linked to Zakir Naik

Mumbai: The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Friday questioned the employees of Harmony Media Limited that edits and uploads controversial televangelist Zakir Naik’s speeches and sermons to gauge which countries have telecasted his shows. The Asian Age spoke to two employees, one who headed the Information Technology (IT) head and the other the head of the CCTV and electrical department of the media agency.

The employees said that the officials reached the office premises located in Dongri which previously housed the office of Global Education, at about 6 am. “They then asked the administrative head to come to the office and then entered the office premises by 10 am. By then, we all received calls from some NIA officials asking us to immediately reach our office,” said the IT head not wishing to be named.

He said that the officials asked him about how many computer systems the office had.

“I told them that we had about 10 computers and described their makes,” he said. He added that the office had about 12 cabins with most of them editing suites used to tune programmes to be broadcasted on Peace TV.

“The editing suites have 10 more systems used to make, edit and send videos to places where Peace TV is broadcasted. These videos earlier included Naik’s speeches but nowadays were mostly religious programmes,” he said. He added that most of the videos were sent to Dubai and other countries in the Middle East.

The head of the CCTV department revealed that the officers were interested in the number of CCTVs in the office. “We have about 61 CCTVs. They asked us where we store our footage and what was the time period. We told them that they were stored in hard disks of 1TB space and erased every 15 days to store new footage,” he said, also withholding his name. He added that the corridors had atleast five to six cameras and the two entry and exit points had cameras installed. “The footage captured by the CCTV is not stored permanently and there is no cloud storage,” he said.

During the raid, the NIA officials also visited a Hotel City Moon, located right next to the Ladies Wing of the IRF. When The Asian Age spoke to the employees of the hotel they revealed that the NIA officials had enquired about a hall rented by Naik and IRF. “There is an events hall located on the second floor of the hotel which was rented by IRF for religious congregation. But they stopped using it three years ago and the NIA officials wanted to know about the same,” an employee said, on the condition of anonymity.